Genres, Like Traffic Laws in New York City, Only are Suggestions
There are no real boundaries
Folks spend a lot of time talking about musical genres. It’s a natural structural tool and framing device. Leonard Bernstein conducted classical orchestras. Miles Davis was a great jazz trumpet player. Traffic was a terrific rock band. Hank Williams was a country music star.
These distinctions are useful and largely accurate. What we should remember, however, that focusing on differences obscures the fact that what is shared is just as important.
This is not an original thought that strikes me whenever I hear a song from one genre being performed by musicians from another. It hit with particular strength a while back watching a video of Janis Joplin performing a song called “Coo Coo,” which is on Big Brother & the Holding Company’s debut album.
I had first heard the song — which has had a variety of similar sounding names — in a wonderful old video (above), which features the important banjo player Clarence Ashley, who is a key figure in the early career of Doc Watson. The song is a meditation on the Cuckoo bird that goes all the way back to the English countryside of the late 1700s or early 1800s.
Folks today likely will have a hard time understanding just how new Joplin, Hendrix and all the other rockers sounded in the late 1960s. It’s really difficult to describe. To put it in perspective, in 1970 Word War II had only ended 25 years earlier. Still middle age folks who had grown up listening to Duke Ellington and Count Basie couldn’t really relate to Led Zeppelin and Captain Beefheart.
It struck me as a great thing that one of the most radically different of all those performers — older folks thought Joplin’s was having some sort of performance art catharsis — chose a song that old. Joplin to us was something very new. But she in a sense was a traditionalist, deeply tied to the blues and even music that came before the blues.
And, of course, that’s not the only old song that Joplin did. She far more famously covered — if that is the right term — George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which is from the opera “Porgy and Bess.”
Lots of Examples
The catalogs are full of cross-genre music. Emerson, Lake and Palmer covered ( yes, the word will do just fine) “Pictures at an Exhibition.” It was composed by Modest Mussorgsky, the guy with the greatest first name ever. I hope his friends called him “Not So.”
Classical artists and orchestras perform Beatles and Jimi Hendrix music all the time. Why shouldn’t they? After all, it’s what everyone in the orchestra grew up listening to. A personal favorite is ZZ Top’s “I Gotsta Get Paid,” which Billy Gibbons says is based on a rap song from the 1990s called “25 Lighters” by Lil’ Keke and Fat Pat.
Traffic’s great “John Barleycorn Must Die” is another English folk song. It’s about distilling liquor. A quick spin around YouTube produces a harpsichord version of Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” a symphonic version of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” Jerry Garcia and David Grisman playing Irving Berlin’s evocative “Russian Lullaby” and Jethro Tull’s pretty version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bourée. And, of course, Lady Gaga has had a wonderful partnership with Tony Bennett and Linda Ronstadt teamed with composer, arranger and Sinatra regular Nelson Riddle on an album.
Here is a Spotify list by an individual named Lasse Nordgren with many other examples. Many of these are obscure and some, I suspect, don’t quite fit the definition. But overall it’s a good list. Classic Rock History offered an article a few years ago listing rock musicians who have released jazz albums. The list includes the late Charlie Watts, Rod Stewart, Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry, Boz Scaggs, Paul McCartney and others.
Metal, the main genre covered most by this publication, is deeply involved in cross genre music. The site Merchants of Air listed 15 metal covers of classical songs several years back. It features a cover of Rimsky Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” by The Great Kat, a version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mekong Delta, Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Apocalyptica and others.
I did a little research for this story. As I was doing so, I began wondering if it is worth writing at all. Of course artists cross genre lines. For one thing, these folks weren’t born rockers or jazz artists. They went to school and in some cases conservatories and played what the teachers and instructors told them to play. They only settled into their agendas later on.
Humans tend to organize and categorize. It helps make sense of the world and learn. But it’s also is a building block of stereotyping and prejudice. While we all are aware that the lines between genres are anything but solid, it’s fun to take a bit of a closer look once in a while.
The last song I’ll highlight is fabulous. Directly above is The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s version of Ennio Morricone’s theme for the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone classic “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” which is above. It starts as kind of a joke and ends up being quite beautiful.